Chuck Ross of the Washington Free Beacon looks behind the curtain of a new Associated Press project to boost news coverage.
The Associated Press will partner with five nonprofit news organizations to beef up “nonpartisan” local news coverage in advance of the November election. Liberal advocacy groups and Democratic megadonors fund all of the AP’s new partners, raising questions about the wire service’s promise to provide “unbiased” news.
One of the AP’s partners in the newly launched content-sharing agreement, California-based nonprofit CalMatters, was cofounded by Simone Otus Coxe, a public relations guru who contributed $100,000 to a pro-Joe Biden super PAC in 2020. Billionaire investor Laurene Powell Jobs’s company, Emerson Collective, has contributed more than $1 million to CalMatters, as have Google cofounder Eric Schmidt’s foundation and venture capitalist John Doerr. The trio have donated north of $5 million to President Biden’s various political committees, according to campaign records.
That’s representative of the funding arrangements for the AP’s other newsroom partners: Nebraska Journalism Trust, Honolulu Civil Beat, Montana Free Press, and South Dakota News Watch. The wire service on Tuesday announced a content-sharing partnership with the five outlets that allows each partner to “share AP journalism” with its audiences. The AP in turn will distribute stories from the outlets to the thousands of news organizations that subscribe to its wire service.
The AP says the initiative aims to “reach new audiences in an election year,” but the five organizations’ liberal backing raises questions about whether they will receive the kind of unbiased news coverage it promises readers. Two of the outlets, CalMatters and Honolulu Civil Beat, coordinate with States Newsroom, a network of local news outlets that the AP itself has said is funded by “left-leaning sources.” One media watchdog said States Newsroom “has been bought by people with a political agenda.”
